Who were Heinrichs and Bachmann? That’s a good question because neither I nor anyone else who’s written about their book covers can offer any more information beyond their names and the dates when they were active. What we do know is that from the mid-60s to an unspecified point in the 1970s Heinrichs and Bachmann’s studio was credited with many cover designs for books published by Heyne in Germany. By the 1980s the studio was still working for Heyne but with a credit now changed to Atelier Heinrichs & Schutz.
The designs featured here date from 1969 to 1971, and are part of a longer run of Heinrichs & Bachmann covers for science fiction titles published from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. I’d run across a few of these in the past but hadn’t gone looking for more until this weekend. I always enjoy seeing unusual approaches to SF illustration, and I especially enjoy anything which adopts this kind of post-psychedelic Pop-collage style. The influence of Heinz Edelmann’s art is evident in places, in particular the Edelmann look as it was filtered through the artists who worked on the Beatles’s Yellow Submarine. The Frank Herbert cover above could easily be added to the Sea of Heads. Also evident are faces that look as though they’ve been lifted from film stills. I’d guess that most of the figures in these collages were clipped from magazine pages then run through a photocopier once or twice to give that posterised effect.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The groovy look